Week 13: Optimizing a 50-employee business using AI Pt 1: Systems

Our journey begins by laying everything out.

I am hitting pause on the regular blogs to take you guys on a long overdue journey for us.

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This edition has the following sections:

Learning: The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work And What To Do About It

Adding Value: Optimizing a 50-employee business using AI Pt 1: Systems

Florida Markets: Florida/National Markets

Interesting things: Tweets

Enjoy!

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Learning:

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work And What To Do About It

I have yet to read this book, but my sister recommended it. According to her, it talks about all of the different problems we have within our business and provides possible solutions that we can apply. It seems interesting, and I will read it soon!

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Adding Value: Optimizing a 50-employee business using AI Pt 1: Systems

I recently onboarded a young civil engineer fresh out of college at our firm; we’ll call him Mike. We hired him to take over our entitlement department's document retrieval process and help with minor revisions such as plot plans and engineer letters.

Currently, we have three people in that department. We’ll call them Jim, Jane, and Michael. They each have an ad-hoc way of working together to approve our permits. It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done—until it doesn’t. On the first day of Mike’s onboarding, I asked Jane, our most experienced person in that department, to show Mike the ropes. I put them on a Zoom call together at 9 am, and by noon, Mike called me. “Hey, Adan, I’m done with the training for the day; let me know what I should do next.” I immediately called Jane and asked what they did; I knew 3 hours was nowhere near the time needed to learn all the processes. This training should take at least a week! When I spoke to her, she said she wasn’t quite sure about Mike’s job and that she just told him how the department worked. The rest of the week went as follows: I would pair Mike up with one of the three staff members, and they would sit with him for a few hours and explain what they did. At the end of the week, Mike had no hands-on training, simply explanations from people doing a job in a way that only they knew how to do in their heads. Nothing was documented, and they didn’t let him participate in any activities. He would sit there and nod as they showed him how to fill out permits, gather construction documents, and submit them to the building departments.

That Friday, I was furious. We wasted a week of work in an inefficient way. Our current employees didn’t get much work done because they were explaining, and Mike didn’t learn much because he wasn’t getting his hands dirty, nor did he have a framework for working at our firm. I’ve read many management books in the past, listened to people, and obtained advice on managing a company; however, the timing wasn’t right. We weren’t big enough as a company to develop real systems. As I sat at my desk, fuming over the week’s lack of progress, I realized the timing for creating real systems was finally here, and we had a major systematic problem within our business: No one knows what their job truly is and they don’t have a framework for how they should do their jobs.

In a panic, I began to reread two books that I remember were very good at explaining how to solve problems like these within a business. The first was The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz; the second was High Output Management by Andrew Grove. I began to read like a madman, finishing both books, about 400 pages in all in a week.

While I read the books, I realized that we had to create systems and that those systems and their training processes had to come from the top—my mom, dad, our top manager, and myself. We knew the business inside and out and had done every job within it in some capacity.

In the next few weeks, I want to document our progress as we work hard to develop systems, document them, and transform them into an intuitive training program that we will deploy over the next few months within all of our departments. This is the story of our first week.

Week 1: Laying it on the table

What was most essential to start this process was to answer a few questions.

1. What departments exist within our business?

2. What job positions reside within those departments?

3. What activities do each of those job positions do?

4. Who is managing each of those people?

I scheduled a game plan for this information-gathering process. We would do several recorded Zoom calls to talk about the departments we are most familiar with. We would answer the four questions above while taking notes. At the end, I would take the transcript of the call along with my notes and summarize it using ChatGPT to ensure we had all of the information organized.

We began immediately and had our first call, during which we identified all of the departments within our business and what job positions were within each. The call was roughly an hour long, and we identified 64 job positions across our company.

The funny thing is that our business doesn’t have 64 employees. Many employees wear different hats, but it was good to see how many jobs are truly done instead of just guessing.

We learned a few things from this call and documentation:

• We have many positions with no written process or training system for doing the job. If one of our senior people left the company, no one would train the new employees.

• We have a significant shortage of management across our whole organization. Multiple jobs don’t answer to anyone. We rely on their good word that they are doing their job.

• We have singular people working across different departments doing jobs